The gay rights movement the Uned Stat began the 1920s and saw huge progrs the 2000s, wh laws prohibg homosexual activy stck down and a Supreme Court lg legalizg same-sex marriage.
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5 ARTISTS WHO HAVE FOUGHT FOR GAY RIGHTS OM ART
June 20, 2021Homosexualy and genr fluidy have appeared as subjects art for lennia, but for morn Wtern cultur, wasn’t until the late 20th century that artists uld treat such them overtly, whout fear of censorship, ostracism or even arrt. The well-documented tippg pot was June 1969, when a route police raid on the Stonewall Inn — a bar Greenwich Village known for drawg a gay, lbian and transgenr crowd — unwtgly gave rise to an ongog groundswell of LGBTQ activism.
At the time, homosexualy was illegal 49 stat, gays and lbians were barred om workg for the feral ernment, and police treated cross-drsg as a punishable crime. After Stonewall, om the 1970s on, art beme a safe space where overtly gay, lbian, trans, queer and nonnformg ias, subjects and imag uld be eely explored.
The long history of homophobia the Wtern world didn’t keep homosexualy out of art, necsarily, but did drive artists to nceal their sexual preferenc behd visual s.
GAY RIGHTS
In his 1934 patg The Fleet’s In, for stance, Pl Cadm ed a natnal sndal wh his pictn of dnken sailors rog wh women, but that hetero actn is, effect, a clever distractn om the homoerotic nuendo of the sailors’ buttock-clgg pants. Experimentg wh mornist tactics, Marsn Hartley ed abstracted symbols to nvey his queerns, while Charl Demuth kept his waterlor pictns of gay subculture the 1930s private. FRANCIS BACON, who was notorly kicked out of his parents’ hoe when his father ught him tryg on his mother’s cloth, did not flnt his homosexualy, but he also did not hold back his art.
For his part, the teemed gay fashn and portra photographer Gee Platt Lyn felt pelled to hi a cril chunk of his ovre — hundreds of male nus — om the public, even though he nsired them his bt work.
Energized by the gay liberatn movement and the growg sense of acceptance and muny followg the Stonewall rebelln, artists the 1970s and early ’80s picted gay, lbian and transgenr subjects wh an unprecented openns. Photography emerged as a particularly ccial vehicle for creasg lbian and gay visibily, as such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Gold, Bill Jabson, Mark Morrisroe and Jack Pierson turned their lens on the LGBTQ life unfoldg around them, poetilly documentg their iends, lovers and nightlife wh the kd of timacy afford only to sirs. “There was a big drive to document gay and lbian and transgenr muni and subcultur and dividuals, and the mera was readily available to do that, ” says Jonathan Weberg, curator and director of rearch at the Mrice Sendak Foundatn and the curator of the 2019 show “Art after Stonewall: 1969– 1989” at the Llie-Lohman Mm of Art.